While Time Can Wait

By J.J. Mainor

A lighthearted short story of a god-like alien who shows up in one man's back yard with a message.

• Language: English
• Publisher: J.J. Mainor
• Release date: Nov 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311092045

J.J. Mainor

I can talk about my characters and stories far more easily than I can talk about myself. The best way to learn about me is through those stories. Writing primarily science fiction, I enjoy worlds and universes that aren't so black and white. Every story has something to say, and every message is not as straight-forward as it seems. We tend to boil ourselves down and define ourselves according to neat labels, whether by race, gender, political identity, or whatever; and the truth is, we're more complicated than that. I try to write worlds and characters that reflect that complexity and diversity of belief.

Book preview

While Time Can Wait

Copyright 2015 by J.J. Mainor

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please return to Smashwords.com or your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Table of Contents

While Time Can Wait

Author’s Notes

Preview: USS Krakowski

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Preview: Are There Heroes In Hell?

Chapter H-1

Chapter H-2

Chapter H-3

Chapter H-4

Preview: Prisoners of Utopia

Chapter P-1

Chapter P-2

Chapter P-3

Chapter P-4

Chapter P-5

Also By J.J. Mainor

While Time Can Wait

Dad! Come quick!

In his fourteen years, Chandler had never before seen a metal box float so gracefully from the sky. If it was a ship or plane of some kind, it was certainly odd. There were no engines or thrusters, no wings or rudders, no doors or windows. It was an ordinary, silvery-white box with rounded edges and corners, and no seems to indicate individual panels in the hull. Nor was there any sign of how it floated from the sky and landed so gently in the garden.

His father Kevin, strolled unconcerned into the room. Whatever his son’s problem was could not have been more troubling than the realization during his morning routine that those silvery streaks in his hair were not a trick of the light. He already had to accept the wrinkling beneath the eyes, and the deepening lines in his forehead and around his mouth, but a couple years remained still of his fourth decade: too soon for gray to creep in.

The job couldn’t have been that stressful, he thought. The IPO last year went off trouble free. As long the customers kept coming bringing their money to the accounts, the investors left him alone. Even so, with a net worth over three billion dollars, he could afford to consider retirement before surrendering the last illusions of youth. He could step away from any headache the company might trigger, and hand control to his vice president.

But Kevin could not ignore the headache outside the rear windows. While his son saw it as an aircraft of some kind, it looked to him like someone parked a cargo container smack in the middle of his outdoor oasis.

Where did that come from?

He hoped to God it wasn’t sitting on his fire pit.

With Chandler in tow, he exited the patio doors. His son’s explanation that it just landed didn’t ring true, although he couldn’t imagine any more plausible explanation himself. It was not as if a trailer could get back there to unload the container. He would have expected to hear the engine and feel the rumble of its movements. Yet there had to be a logical explanation to this box.

He placed his hand on the metal casing. If this had dropped from the sky, he imagined it would feel cold from flying through the air, or hot from a descent through the atmosphere; it was neither. It was no warmer or cooler to the touch than if it had been sitting in his yard all year. He knocked and found the structure hollow. If there was something inside, or if it was meant to be entered, he couldn’t find the door. But as if the thing sensed his confusion, a section of the wall near his hand shimmered and a doorway dissolved from the face of the box. Kevin jumped back as if he had been poking a snake without expecting it to lunge.

A creature stepped from the opening onto the lawn. It appeared to be human, though Kevin noted something off about it. Its face, its hair, its eyes, all seemed…generic was the word that came to mind. It did not have the slightest hint of wrinkles or lines in the face like he saw on his own face every morning in the mirror. Its skin was perfectly uniform in color. There were no red spots, no light or dark patches. Kevin couldn’t even find the blue lines marking the veins. It wore a seemingly unisex robe, same silvery-white color as the box, which concealed any physical hints to the creature’s gender. And like the box, there were no seams to the garment, as though it had been woven into shape.

Chandler looked on in awe, though his father remained cautious, holding the boy behind him. The creature approached, studying both intently.

What do you want, Kevin finally asked it, as though somehow expecting it to understand. And yet, not only did it understand, but it responded in perfect English. It spoke without even a hint of an accent, like someone who had trained their speech for years preparing for a role on the nightly news.

You are Kevin Riordan.

How it knew his name was a frightening mystery. Could this thing have been watching him and his family before making its appearance? What did it even want? The questions rushed through his mind, swirled with the fears of what it planned to do. Surely he would find more gray hairs tomorrow…if he was still around.

The thing seemed to sense Kevin’s apprehension. I am W’n Loo. Do not be afraid.

As a demonstration of its sincerity, W’n Loo’s form melted into that of a tiger. The animal approached Chandler, and with the affection of an ordinary housecat, it rubbed its head against his leg. Then it returned to its original spot in front of the box, and took back the human form.

While doing little to assuage Kevin’s fears, the teenager was in awe.

How did you do that, Chandler asked.

My people have the ability to manipulate matter with our minds.

Even after seeing the parlor trick, Kevin remained skeptical. To prove its abilities, W’n Loo began demonstrating with a host of tricks. It (or rather she, as the creature would eventually reveal to the pair) sprouted a field of poppies throughout the yard, creating any color imaginable, not just red or white, but neon colors, and some in the infrared spectrum that Kevin and Chandler were unable to enjoy.

She held out her hand, plucking atoms from the air and coalescing them into an apple, which she gave to Chandler to sample. He took a bite. Though it tasted a bit off (he couldn’t quite place what was missing from the flavor), he was impressed with the product.

She even levitated the patio furniture. As she explained, she not only subtracted atoms to weaken the density, but increased the concentration of the air molecules around the pieces so as to make them literally lighter than the air.

Kevin accepted that W’n Loo meant to cause no harm. If she truly possessed the powers her tricks implied, then he had no means to oppose her. Any deception was useless on her part since she could conjure anything she desired, or atomize both him and his son from existence with a flick of her mind. As she went on to explain, she only had a message to deliver.

W’n Loo invited the father and son into the box, rematerializing the door behind them. The interior was about as plain and uninteresting as the exterior. This thing was genuinely a box, although she altered the walls to make them transparent; the dual purpose of which was to bring light in, and allow them to see out. They watched as, like the furniture, this box lifted off from the ground on its way into the atmosphere.

While their vehicle rose higher and higher, W’n Loo related her story. Her people were from a world far, far off in the universe, arising among the first generation of worlds after creation. Her people evolved billions of years before our sun even considered existence. Their minds developed to our level of mental power and beyond. As she explained, when they began to exhibit the first rudimentary control, they experimented in order to learn the extent of these abilities. At first they had only small, localized control of objects, but they soon learned they could make modest adjustments within their own brains.

Within a single orbit of their world, they had triggered a full scale, artificial evolution, increasing their brain power, and thus their abilities. They learned to draw the nutrients their bodies needed from the air itself, eliminating the need for food. Agriculture disappeared almost instantly, and with it, natural population controls.

They found they could extract materials from the ground and create whatever objects they needed in their lives. All industry followed in agriculture’s path. Eventually when their power increased enough to reconfigure the atoms themselves, scarcity of base materials disappeared. Any sense of economy disappeared. Currency became irrelevant. There were no longer the haves and have-nots, only doers.

Chandler watched, mouth agape as their box ascended above the clouds. Were they really heading into space he wondered.

W’n Loo explained to him and his father that once freed from matters of survival, her people took to exploration. They began building ships like the one they were in, before realizing they could alter their bodies further to survive unaided in the vacuum of space. Soon after that, they found a way to explore without the journey.

W’n Loo darkened the craft’s panels to filter the sun’s light. Kevin had grown up watching Star Wars and Star Trek. How cool it would have been to see the moon, if only they weren’t on the wrong side of the world.

Your people learned to teleport!

Not as you think of it. With a thought, the image of Earth outside switched to a solid wall of brownish swirling clouds. Kevin peered around, finding empty space outside the other faces of their box. But this wasn’t their box. This craft was larger, perhaps a mother ship to the smaller shuttle they left his back yard in.

It had the same, antiseptic, silver-white theme; and it was similarly empty except for the three of them. Kevin realized they were still breathing, so the air in the cabin had the same composition as on Earth. The temperature, too was comfortable. And since the aliens didn’t need environment, the craft was obviously prepared for their arrival.

Chandler remained fixated on the clouds out the one side. So close, he could see individual wisps swirling and churning within the brownish soup.

W’n Loo informed him they were in close orbit around a gas giant thousands of light years from Earth, similar to Jupiter, but smaller, yet denser. The orbit of their craft was so low, it skimmed the outermost traces of hydrogen in the atmosphere.

Were we just transported, Chandler asked.

Recreated. W’n Loo explained that they learned to manipulate matter across vast distances in the universe. They could get around the physical limits of the universe, by creating copies of themselves at the destination point. Once the mind was completed and the copy became a fully functional duplicate, the original would be dissolved into its base atoms.

In this case, though, W’n Loo chose not to destroy the originals. While she had the ability to recreate them all back at Earth when finished here, it remained easier to simply alter the memories in those originals to contain the memories of these copies after the trip. It was strange for Kevin to think that there were other versions of themselves left back at Earth twiddling their thumbs and killing time while their copies enjoyed this tour of the universe.

But W’n Loo explained that her people did not tour the universe; not at first. Their minds reached out and found other civilizations to which they appeared. Exploration was slow, so they learned to recreate specific memories from those cultures into their own heads, knowing everything they wanted